1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to estimating virtual machine resource utilization information, and more particularly, to estimating physical resource utilization information for individual virtual machines running on a server.
2. Description of the Related Art
Collecting accurate virtual machine (VM) resource utilization information is important for performing a variety of management tasks. For example, when provisioning resources, resource utilization information is used as the basis for sizing virtual machines. For overload management tasks, virtual machine resource utilization information is used to select virtual machines which are to be migrated to another server, as well as the target servers which are to receive the virtual machines. For power management tasks, virtual machine resource utilization information is used to consolidate virtual machines. As another example, for application management, performance modeling uses resource utilization information to build the relationship between application performance and resource demand.
Unfortunately, resource virtualization and multiplexing operations present a number of issues which make it difficult for information technology (IT) systems to obtain accurate virtual machine resource utilization information. One particular problem relates to profiling physical resource utilization for individual virtual machines.
The profiling problem is difficult for several reasons. Difficulties arise because the virtual-to-physical (V2P) resource activity mapping is not always one-to-one, and may depend on the characteristics of the application workload. Other complications stem from the cross-resource utilization causality among different resources (e.g., CPU, memory, disk I/O, network, etc.) associated with virtualization and multiplexing operations which occur when virtual machines are being consolidated. Furthermore, the problem becomes even more difficult when the actual resource demand of the virtual machines is hidden due to a server overload on physical resources.